“Visa oss ditt bästa warrior face”: A study of English in Swedish print advertisements

Abstract

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to shed some light as to how many English words can be found in the print advertisements of an everyday newspaper Metro, as well as investigating what type of companies are prone to using English in their advertisement and furthermore, the location of English words in the advertisements. A distinction was made between English and Swedish words by counting them and furthermore, categorising companies in terms of what they aimed to sell and whether or not they included English in their advertisements. Furthermore, the location of the English words were categorised and classified as moves by using a model by Garcia-Yeste, inspired by Bhatia. This helped in gaining knowledge of what purpose the English words served in different locations of the advertisements. The final aim was to find out why companies choose to include English words in their advertisements and this was investigated by three companies answering a small questionnaire of 2-3 questions as to why they did or did not use English in their advertisements. The results showed that more than half of the companies investigated used some English in their advertisements, 7.2% of all the words counted turned out to be in English and the location of English words was most likely to be found in the main text or the logo.